This little Tweak - it would be a lie to call it Update or Patch - is aimed to make Black Mesa walkthrough somehow more balanced and helps player to stay always focused on gameplay, not on saving and reloading, because of some unexpected hardcore elements, or repeating the same action dozens of time, because of some uncomfortoble player controls features.

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Installation: simply copy Steam folder from BlackMesaTweak.zip over your Steam folder in Program Files with overwriting. If you'd like to backup original Black Mesa settings you should backup this folder in particularly Steam\steamapps\sourcemods\BMS\cfg

2. Tweaked the height of jumping, so player could normally jump over small boxes (Thanks to Vanzetti).

3. Increased the range of minimum and maximum damage that Marines fire-bursts can inflict, so they're not absolute "death-machines", but simply a challenging enemies (Thanks to TwelveEyes).

4. Increased AI reaction delay time for making all enemies and friends reactions as well somehow more equal to reaction possibilities of usual-non-casual player (Thanks to AutoDMC).

5. Increased Land Mines damage to absolutely deadly, as long as they are purely visible, easy to get around and as a result are useless in terms of challenging gameplay.

6. Increased Zombies health and damage, so they're harder to kill and more dangerous. Practically this tweak doesn't makes gameplay any harder as long as zombies in general are slow-walking "shooting targets" enemies. But now an accidental meeting with zombie face to face somehow is a more memorable event. Simply because it's hard to imagine how analerted the player should be to be killed by a zombie in original Black Mesa and now it's quite possible to be slashed by a zombie, if player wouldn't stay alerted, while moving among dead bodies, peacefully lying on the floor.

7. Increased Ichthyosaur damage a little bit to make those creatures truly only a little bit more dangereous. Simultaneously increased their health so mimally 2 direct crossbow hits in vital parts of their body would kill them. They're already killable only by 2 crossbow hits, but player could "scratch" them twice in a tail for example and that would result in Ichthyosaur death. Now player should hit them twice only in head to kill or shoot much more arrows in less vital parts of body.

8. Increased the "recharching" time of Vortigaunts and balanced it with simultaneously increasing their health.

9. Doubled the reloading time of Abrams tank, because it was unreasonably short, so you couldn't even wait for explosion smoke to clear and then step out from your cover to fire by yourself.

10. Doubled the so called "rest time" of Apache helicopter for the same reasons as for doubling Abrams tank reloading time.

11. Doubled the time player can stay underwater and balanced it with simultaneously doubling the damage player receives, when air runs out.

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Thanks to all of the Black Mesa team-members. The game experience was unexpectedly great and absolutely satisfying in general.

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This little Tweak is made by Alex Ros with all respect to real authors of this great game (both Valve and Black Mesa teams).

At the moment air reserve forces you to move underwater as quickly as possible. As a result you notice absolutely nothing around you. No chance to look around and explore anything at all, just swim swim and swim, faster faster and faster. I think there should be less rushing so you could SIMPLY see what is around you, notice level design for example. It's all about that. Similar to Water Hazard in Half-Life 2 where you shoud drive your airboat quickly and that's the point, BUT you still can stop and simply look around.

Could you please tell how only to replace crouch-jumping with normal ones and how to increase Abrams/Apache reloading time? Cause it's actually two important things I wish to be in the game.

Simply delete modified skill.cfg and return original skill.cfg file. Than open it with Notepad++ or with usual Windows Notepad and find line sk_abrams_maingun_reload_time and change value to "1.50". Than find 2 lines sk_apache_resttime and just next to it sk_apache_chargetime and change value to "4". And finally find 3 lines at the beginning of the file and change values that way:bms_normal_jump_vertical_speed "200"bms_normal_jump_crouch_vertical_speed "200"bms_double_jump_vertical_speed "240"

I think in Steam release there will be much more hardcoded tweaks. There're some places in the game which causes serious performance errors and even crashes and it's better to solve problems of that sort via Hammer, by making slight changes to level design. Also I met some places where I simply stucked and had to load a nearest quicksave. Or for example, it's extremely annoyng at Lambda Core when those swinging platforms are killing you instantly with no chance to climb somehow back and try to jump once again. But exactly this thing can be tweaked via changing entities properties directly in script files, but I'm not sure about that. In conclusion I can say there're more important things, which should be changed to make game more player-friendly and bugless, than my tiny tweaks. But that's OK, even VALVE're releasing patches and updates.